Howard Stringer says sorry for the hacks on Sony, saying public disclosure was enacted as soon as was possible.

It has been a manic time for Sony these past few weeks as it has sought to restore services to gamers following the breaches on the Playstation Network (PSN) and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) division.

“As a company we - and I - apologise for the inconvenience and concern caused by this attack,” Stringer said.

“We are absolutely dedicated to restoring full and safe service as soon as possible and rewarding you for your patience. We will settle for nothing less.”

Stringer addressed those who had criticised Sony for not coming clean sooner on the breaches.

“As soon as we discovered the potential scope of the intrusion, we shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired some of the best technical experts in the field to determine what happened,” he said.

“I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process. Hackers, after all, do their best to cover their tracks, and it took some time for our experts to find those tracks and begin to identify what personal information had — or had not — been taken.”

There were no confirmed reports of credit card fraud resulting from the hacks, Stringer said.

To make it up to users, Sony is also offering one month's free PlayStation Plus membership for all PSN customers, as well as a subscriptions extension for PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited customers.

Sony confirmed it had made an “important step” towards restoring PSN services as it entered the final stages of testing the new system.

The Japanese electronics firm has taken hits to its reputation and its shares as a result of the hacks, seeing a decline of nearly four per cent in early trade on Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei index, the BBC reported.